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appendum << addendum, appendix

To some, at least, an appendix to a written work is not quite the same as an addendum. The Australian Online Grammar web site distinguishes them in this way:

An appendix supplements the body of a document, providing detailed information that not everyone will want to read. Appendices are often statistical, historical or technical.

An addendum is extra information that the writer discovered after writing the report, such as a new study on the topic. It’s a bit like a PS.

For other, however, there is a large overlap in meaning between the two terms. This overlap may be why the blend “appendum” has established itself in scholarly English in recent decades. As far as I can tell, “appendum” hasn’t made it into a credible dictionary yet.

Some examples:

Danish consumer site: “The appendum contains guidance as to how broadband speed connections should be marketed to comply with the law.”

Web virus forum: “ looked in the appendum and it said they could be accessed via the OTHERS effects menu,”

“Appendum” is a blend, to be sure, but it is arguably an eggcorn – someone tries to write/say “addendum” and “append” slips in, gives a little Mae West hip flip, and the next thing the speaker knows he is waking up in a brothel with “appendum” beside him in the bed and the lexicography squad banging on the door.

Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Latest book: Boundary Layer

Re: appendum << addendum, appendix

virtually any semantically-based blend (and most, at least of the ones I notice, are) is “arguably an eggcorn”.

We’ve run into this problem before. The issue turns on what is in the mind of the perpetrator, doesn’t it? And minds and motives, as we all know, are difficult to descry and descrybe (Pause for a moment to think how modern legal systems contort their torts around the topic of motives.)

Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Latest book: Boundary Layer

Re: appendum << addendum, appendix

I should have limited that to inadvertent, non-purposeful semantics-based blends. And probably even further to inadvertent, non-purposeful semantics-based blends that are standard for the speaker. But I think it would be hard to find any of that class that were not eggcornish.

*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .